Wall Street warms to enterprise software: Could this bode well for Smartsheet, DocuSign and others?

The way Steve Singh sees it, big changes are coming to the enterprise software world. “There will be a next generation SAP or Oracle that will be created in the next 20 years,” he said on stage at an Alliance of Angels dinner in Seattle last week. Singh is worth a listen when it comes to enterprise software. He co-founded travel expense company Concur and sold it to SAP in 2014 for $8.3 billion, spent three years at the German software giant, and now runs Docker, the fast-growing cloud container technology platform. “Enterprise applications will get completely rewritten,” Singh added. That re-write, if you will, could create an entirely new cast of characters, bringing new efficiencies to the workplace and making businesses more data-enabled. Incumbent tech giants have long dominated the enterprise software landscape. But a new crop of companies are emerging, using technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and the cloud to gain market share, attract investor attention and win customers. Optimism for the future of enterprise software showed last month when cloud storage behemoth Dropbox went public and saw shares spike 35 percent. Cloud security startup Zscaler, meanwhile, saw shares grow 106 percent in its first day of trading in mid-March. Others are also now eager to test the public markets. Work automation service Smartsheet filed for an IPO last week, and digital signature giant DocuSign did the same a few days later. Zuora, an enterprise resource planning software company, also filed to go public last month, while workforce… [Read full story]